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The Final Days

Looking Forward With the end of President Bushs time in office approaching, the news media  and most of the public  seem to have already moved on.Credit
R. Kikuo Johnson

The armored black limousine rolled to a halt near the foot of Air Force One. Secret Service agents opened the doors simultaneously, and from opposite sides emerged President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain. They circled around to stand side by side and, for the next 14 seconds, smiled and waved at the assembled cameras — 14 seconds of ritual demanded by political convention. Bush pecked the senator’s wife, Cindy, on the cheek, shook McCain’s hand and sprinted up the stairs. At the top of the landing, he waved again and disappeared into the plane. That was May. As of late this month, the president and the would-be successor from his own party have not spoken since.

A relationship fraught with bitter resentment, grudging respect and mutual dependence takes center stage this week as the Republican Party gathers in St. Paul to pass the mantle of leadership. As at that May photo opportunity in Phoenix, which followed a fund-raiser, Bush will be ushered out of the spotlight as quickly as possible — if not in 14 seconds, then not all that much longer. After an opening-night speech tomorrow, he will leave town with none of the celebratory rock-star attention Bill Clinton commanded at Al Gore’s convention and retreat to Camp David before McCain even arrives at the Xcel Energy Center for his coronation.

No matter how careful the orchestration, though, a rivalry seared in the brutal lowlands of South Carolina circles around to this moment. Eight years after their epic Republican primary battle of 2000, the first-place finisher desperately needs the second-place finisher to win in order to validate his own legacy. And the runner-up now finds himself saddled with the baggage of a man he never much liked to begin with, forced to live with a record he personally considers deeply lacking and portrayed as if he were a clone of his longtime adversary. As John Weaver, McCain’s former chief strategist told me, “I’m sure McCain is thinking, Is Bush going to beat me twice?”

Anxious denizens of Bushworld worry that McCain will beat himself and in the process take down their best chance for deliverance when it comes to the verdict of history. One former Bush aide who spends his days publicly bashing Barack Obama sat down for lunch with me recently and before the appetizers even arrived lamented that the Democrat will probably crush McCain. He ruefully called Obama one of the three most talented political figures of his lifetime, along with John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Bush’s political guru, Karl Rove, in conversations with friends this summer, could hardly restrain his exasperation at what he saw as the McCain team’s dysfunctional organization and sclerotic message. And the president himself, according to friends and prominent Republicans, privately rails about what he considers McCain’s undisciplined approach to the campaign and grouses about McCain’s efforts to distance himself from the administration. A new McCain ad this month declared, “We’re worse off than we were four years ago.” That’s the sort of stinging indictment a candidate usually issues when the other party is in the White House.

The president understands the treacherous political environment facing Republicans and agrees that McCain cannot run as another George Bush, advisers say, but he also seems to think that the senator risks going too far because he needs the party base that still supports Bush and remains unenthusiastic about McCain. “The idea that people could think he and Bush are at all alike probably drives him crazy,” Dan Bartlett, the former Bush White House counselor, says of McCain. “But if they wake up every morning thinking George W. Bush is a bigger problem than Barack Obama, they’re going to lose.”

McCain has not called the president for advice, so Bush vents his frustrations and criticisms of Obama during phone calls and get-togethers with current and former advisers. (He and Rove still meet for lunch every few weeks.) They say that the elevation of some veterans from their team, like Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace, to key positions within the campaign is making a difference, and there have been signs lately that more order has been imposed on the operation. People in both the McCain and Bush camps take heart in polls showing a closer race than many initially expected. But longstanding suspicions are hard to overcome. “You’ve got a lot of people in that campaign who really dislike the president,” a McCain insider said. “There’s still a lot of people who carry a torch for the 2000 campaign.” Among them, members of the McCain camp say, is the candidate’s wife, Cindy, who remains bitter over the personal attacks on her family eight years ago.

The Arizona senator has hardly been subtle in his efforts to keep a distance from the president. The Phoenix event was originally scheduled as an open fund-raiser at the city’s convention center, only to be moved to private residences behind closed doors at the last minute, which had the effect of drawing even more attention to the awkward, abbreviated encounter on the tarmac afterward. McCain’s “On the Trail” photo album on his campaign Web site features pictures of him with Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Rudy Giuliani, Bill O’Reilly, Jon Stewart, Chris Matthews, Regis Philbin, even the ladies from “The View” — in short, everyone but Bush. And senior Republicans say no joint appearances are planned this fall.

“We’re trying to get the guy elected,” Mark Salter, perhaps McCain’s closest adviser, told me with a what-can-you-do shrug. “We’re obviously mindful of the president’s” — and here he paused for a moment to think of a diplomatic way of making his point — “less-than-comfortable position in the country. You feel bad for the guy, if you think about it.”

George Bush does not want anyone feeling bad for him. Hates the idea, in fact. Why should anyone feel bad for him? He knew what he was getting into, and he is doing what he thinks is right. But as he enters the twilight of his presidency, he finds it both a liberating and a deeply frustrating time.

With the war in Iraq finally going better, the dark cloud that dominated the White House for the past few years has lifted. The overnight reports Bush finds on his Oval Office desk each morning now list fewer casualties in Iraq, easing a burden friends say has weighed on him. It now looks as if the surge, one of the riskiest presidential decisions in a generation, has been vindicated. And Bush seems to be making progress getting North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons while winning a string of Congressional battles that would under other circumstances be seen as legacy victories — a bipartisan deal on wiretapping, war financing without strings, expansion of his global AIDS program.

As a result, friends say that Bush, who just turned 62, has been looser lately, more relaxed, more willing to joke around and even do a little dance for the cameras from time to time. He sees the end and has been thinking about life after the White House back down at the ranch and at a new home in Dallas. “You can hear his Texas accent creeping back into his voice, rather than the I’m-the-president, no-accent kind of voice,” observed an old friend from Texas.

Yet there are no valedictory days for Bush. For years, he got no credit for a long-running economic recovery, in part because of popular anger over Iraq. Now, it seems, he gets no credit for the improvements in Iraq because of deep discontent over the tattered economy. Housing and energy crises have only deepened public disaffection. While Iraq stabilizes, Afghanistan seems to be unraveling. Russia has been rampaging through its neighbor Georgia, undeterred by Bush’s consternation. As John Weaver told me, “They look better on Iraq, but they look worse on everything else.” So many onetime loyalists have turned on the president that when the former White House press secretary Scott McClellan came out with his break-with-the-boss book in May, Bush sighed and told an aide to find a way to forgive him or risk being consumed with anger.

While Bush publicly commits to “sprinting to the finish” and eschews talk of legacy, even friends say how he will be judged and remembered seems to be on his mind these days. “When I was there, that legacy talk was strictly discouraged,” says David Frum, a White House speechwriter in Bush’s first term. “It was considered very destructive, and we’d all seen what it had done to Clinton in his last year. That seems to have changed obviously lately. From what I hear now, he takes it very, very seriously. He doesn’t joke about it like he used to.”

Bush’s place in history depends on alternate narratives that are hard to reconcile. To critics, he is the man who misled the country into a disastrous war, ruined U.S. relations around the world, wrecked the economy, squandered a budget surplus to give tax cuts to fat-cat friends, played the guitar while New Orleans drowned, politicized the Justice Department, cozied up to oil companies and betrayed American values by promoting torture, warrantless eavesdropping and a modern-day gulag at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for people never even charged with a crime. To admirers, he is the man who freed 60 million people from tyranny in Afghanistan and Iraq and planted a seed that may yet spread democracy in a vital region, while at home he reduced taxes, introduced more accountability to public schools through No Child Left Behind, expanded Medicare to cover prescription drugs, installed two new conservative Supreme Court justices and, most of all, kept America safe after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Whatever the president’s virtues, they remain unappreciated in his own time. To say that Bush is unpopular only begins to capture the historic depths of his estrangement from the American public. He is arguably the most disliked president in seven decades. Sixty-nine percent of Americans disapproved of his performance in office in a Gallup poll in April, the highest negative rate ever recorded for any president since the firm began asking the question in 1938. And while Harry Truman and Richard Nixon at their worst had even fewer supporters — Truman once fell to 22 percent in his job approval rating and Nixon to 24 percent, compared with Bush’s low of 28 percent — no president has endured such a prolonged period of public rejection. Bush has not enjoyed the support of a majority of Americans since March 2005, meaning he will go through virtually his entire second term without most of the public behind him.

Bush has been so far down for so long that his aides long ago gave up any hope that the numbers would change while he is still in office. “There’s kind of a liberating aspect to it,” Dan Bartlett told me over lunch in July, at a homey steak joint in Austin, where he returned after leaving the White House last year. “It’s not that you chase polls, but you’re cognizant of them. So if you know they’re not going to change, you can just do what you think is right.”

If anything, it may be that the low numbers have become almost a badge of honor for Bush. Not that he wants to be unpopular, but he sees leadership as a test. “Calcium” is a favorite term he uses with aides to describe the backbone he admires. “He does make a lot of references to Truman as the model of his late presidency, and the Truman model is unrewarded heroism — or ‘heroism’ is not the right word: unrewarded courage,” Michael Gerson, another former senior adviser to the president, told me. “It fits very much his approach and his self-conception. His view of leadership is defined as doing the right thing against pressure.”

Donald Ensenat, a friend of Bush’s for more than 40 years who worked as his chief of protocol before stepping down last year, said that the president’s view, as he paraphrased it, has come down to this: “I’ve already taken my last licks for being unpopular, so these last two years I do what’s right — that’s my job, not with my finger in the air.”

If Bush ever wonders why he is not doing better, he does not do so in public. Stoicism has been a hallmark of his second term. At a Black Music Month concert in the East Room earlier this summer, a precocious 15-year-old girl with a powerful voice fixed her gaze on the president to offer her own reassurances in the form of a gospel number called “Hold On.”

“I am sure that there have been many times where you have felt like all hope was gone, you felt like you wanted to give up or you couldn’t make it,” the rising young gospel star, Spensha Baker, said to the president as the audience watched. “But the reason why this country is such a strong country is because you held on. And so I wanted to thank you for that.”

Bush swayed to the music and jumped up to give her a kiss on the cheek when she was done. “He gets a lot of flak,” Baker told me later, “but I don’t think people know how hard it is to be president of the United States, and I wanted to come in and encourage him.” But did the president relate to the lyrics? Has he felt lost in the dark? Does he ever experience moments of doubt or despair?

Bush gives little indication that he does. He can flash anger over what he considers unfounded criticism or at something on his schedule he does not like, but he does not wrestle with his inner demons, at least not out loud. “He doesn’t second-guess himself,” Jim Francis, a longtime friend from Texas, told me. “I second-guess myself all the time — ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have done this or that.’ He just doesn’t have that in him. I have never seen him do that. I think it gives him a comfort level in that office that others have not had.” As Kirbyjon Caldwell, a Texas pastor who gave the benediction at both of Bush’s inaugurations and officiated at Jenna Bush’s wedding, told me, “Assuming the fetal position is just not in his vocabulary.”

Friends and advisers usually cite what some call “the three Fs” to explain Bush’s seeming serenity in the face of so much tumult — faith, family and friends. “It’s his deep-seated faith in God,” says Mike Conaway, who once worked for Bush and now serves as a Republican congressman from Texas. “He’s rooted in his walk with Christ. He believes he’s got a role and he’s doing what God wants him to do.”

And then there is his near-fanatical dedication to his workout regimen, which friends credit for keeping him on an even keel. When Bush is in town during the week, schedulers know to leave enough time in the afternoon for him to slip out for a workout. On the weekends, he favors two-hour bicycle rides at a Secret Service training facility outside Washington, where he sometimes asks companions and agents to ride behind him so that he can have the illusion of riding alone.

The president makes bicycling an exercise not just in sweat but also in survival, particularly at his Texas ranch. Tony Snow, his onetime press secretary, who died in July, once made the mistake of telling Bush that he would enjoy riding with him sometime. “I was just, you know, trying to make nice,” Snow recounted in a commencement address at the Catholic University of America last year. “I was trying to kiss up to the boss.”

But Bush took him seriously. “Snow, you ready to ride?” he called out the first time Snow went down to the ranch.

Not really, as it turned out. “You go off-road,” Snow recalled, “and there’s a drop of about 15 or 20 feet. It rises up again and then goes around the curve. The president goes down and goes, ‘Woo hoo!’ Person behind him goes down and goes, ‘Woo hoo!’ I’m in the back and I go, ‘Waaaah.’ ”

Right into a tree.

“Snow, you O.K. back there?” Bush called out.

“Yes, sir. Just hit a tree.”

“O.K., well, come on, then.”

The devotion to exercise and schedules seems to stem from the same discipline Bush summoned to quit drinking at age 40. “He’s the first one to admit that he has an addictive personality, and he has to channel this addictiveness to constructive things,” Dan Bartlett told me. “He likes systems; he likes structure. It’s interesting — for a personality that’s so free-form, he does like structure.”

He also likes to look ahead rather than back. “When you’re working for the president,” Bartlett says, “you’ve always got to give him something to look forward to.”

Bush refers to his time in office as “a joyous experience,” a phrase that seems jarring. A satisfying experience, pursuing important goals, maybe, or a vital experience, to be at the center of so many historic moments. But joyous? With all the heartache, the wars, the political attacks? “You know, obviously, there’s some good days and some bad days,” Bush tried to explain at a forum in Missouri in May. “I feel so strongly about my principles and my values, and I’m an optimistic guy.”

For better or worse, Bush’s legacy will start with Iraq. And that’s where his fortunes are tied most closely to McCain’s.

The war looked lost and most of the country had abandoned faith in Bush when the Arizona senator sat down to write the president a letter on Dec. 12, 2006. In the aftermath of what Bush called the “thumpin’ ” his party took in the elections that ousted the Republican Congress the month before, the president had finally dumped the much-criticized defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his failing strategy in Iraq. In the private three-page letter, which was given to me last month, McCain warned the president bluntly that he would lose the war without an increase in U.S. forces. He argued that the administration’s approach had it backward — instead of hoping that a political settlement among warring sectarian groups would reduce violence, the administration needed to establish security to create space for an eventual political reconciliation. McCain cited an American Enterprise Institute study suggesting an additional 30,000 troops. “Without a basic level of security, there will be no political solution, and our mission will fail,” McCain wrote.

A month later, Bush announced just such a plan, overruling the objections or concerns of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his outgoing field commanders, the Iraq Study Group (led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton), the new Democratic majorities in Congress and a sizable number of his fellow Republicans — all part of a Washington consensus that, to varying degrees, wanted him to pull troops out, not send more in. McCain, for once, was impressed that Bush stood up to the pressure. In his mind, that was real leadership.

“He could have done the easy thing,” says Terry Nelson, a political strategist who worked for both Bush and McCain. “He could have taken the Baker-Hamilton report, and everyone would have said that was good. And instead, he took a gigantic political risk, which today seems to be paying enormous benefits in terms of security in Iraq and political progress. And he gets no credit. None.”

That was a moment of real turnabout for the rocky relationship between Bush and McCain. Or perhaps “relationship” is not quite the right word. “There’s never really been that much of a relationship,” Mark Salter told me. “They kept their distance.”

Bush and McCain were both born to elite families, one the son of a president and grandson of a senator, the other the son and grandson of Navy admirals. They both have a certain irreverent, rebellious streak; they both grew up spending a lot of time on the party circuit, and not the political kind. And they both overcame youthful immaturity through their own personal trials — Bush’s decision to quit drinking and McCain’s obviously more extreme experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

But in many other ways, they could hardly be more different. Bush is an early-to-bed, early-to-rise man. He rarely veers off his talking points. He absolutely hates it when someone forgets to turn a cellphone off during an event and once half-jokingly locked his secretary of state out of a cabinet meeting for being tardy. McCain adheres to scripts only under protest, relishing a more free-for-all approach to politics and life. He seems most at ease during the take-on-all-comers town-hall meetings and sessions with reporters. He orders his campaign plane at night to keep going to the next day’s stop no matter how late it gets in, then stays up until midnight watching sports. Mark McKinnon, a media strategist for both men at different points, once told me that working for Bush was like serving in the British Royal Navy, while working for McCain was more like sailing with the Pirates of the Caribbean.

Over the years, the two have become “frenemies,” as Time magazine put it; not quite friends, not quite enemies. “They’re friendly,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican and McCain ally who has watched the two men up close. “They don’t hang out together. I don’t think John’s ever been to Camp David. I think it’s respectful. President Bush respects Senator McCain, and I think Senator McCain respects the office of the presidency.”

Neither man knew much about the other as they both geared up for the 2000 race. Bush did not take McCain seriously at first, predicting he “will wear thin,” as he told his friend Doug Wead in a conversation that Wead secretly taped and later made public. The scale of that misjudgment became clear when McCain thrashed Bush in the New Hampshire primary. Bush was gracious in the concession call that night, but the spirit of civil competition between the two men would not last. “We said goodbye as friends,” McCain later recalled in a memoir. “We would soon be friends no more.”

The crucible came in South Carolina, where the tone took a decidedly low turn. Bush stood by as a surrogate at a campaign event accused McCain of forgetting fellow veterans when he returned after five and a half years of captivity in North Vietnam. At McCain headquarters, reports kept pouring in about flyers and phone calls insinuating all manner of scurrilous things about the senator — he had fathered a black child out of wedlock, he beat his wife, he was mentally unstable, he had a secret Vietnamese family, he was a Manchurian candidate, he was gay, his wife was a drug addict and so forth. Bush denied any involvement in the whisper campaign, but for his own part took umbrage at a McCain ad saying the Texas governor “twists the truth like Clinton.”

“Stuff happened in South Carolina that none of us liked,” Mark Salter, McCain’s alter ego, told me over a beer in a hotel bar during a campaign swing in New England last month. “But you never knew how much” was orchestrated by Bush or his people. McCain’s campaign was crushed in South Carolina, and McCain did little to hide his anger, calling Bush “a combination of the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow” — in other words, a man with no courage, no heart and no brain. Cindy McCain stewed over the attacks, particularly the “illegitimate black child” allegation, a vicious reference to their adopted daughter Bridget, a baby she brought home from an orphanage in Bangladesh run by Mother Teresa. The night of the primary, Cindy cried in the candidate’s hotel suite.

McCain backed Bush for the general election, but without enthusiasm. He grew testy at reporters parsing his words, at one point blurting out, “I endorse Governor Bush, I endorse Governor Bush, I endorse Governor Bush,” repeating it seven times as if he were a delinquent scrawling his penance on a chalkboard. To this day, there is a debate about whether McCain actually voted for Bush against Gore. The liberal blogger Arianna Huffington and a couple of Hollywood actors say he told them at a dinner before the January 2001 inauguration that he did not. McCain denies that.

Either way, he quickly set about making clear he was no Bush man. Although he rejected Democratic entreaties to bolt his party, McCain opposed the new president’s tax cuts because, he said, they favored the rich, and he pushed through campaign finance legislation over White House reservations. “It wasn’t intended to annoy the White House,” Salter said. “He had his own ideas, his own national following.” Bush signed the campaign-finance bill into law but, in a snub, held no public ceremony.

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Credit
R. Kikuo Johnson

Through the worst of it, McCain, the old Navy man, always stood when talking with Bush on the telephone. And after the Sept. 11 attacks, he rallied behind his commander in chief all the way through the invasion of Iraq. But he soon soured on the president’s handling of the war, and by 2004 even entertained a discussion with John Kerry about becoming his running mate on the Democratic ticket. “There was some argument about it,” a top official from Bush’s re-election campaign recalled. “We asked ourselves: ‘Were they really talking? Was he really serious?’ It was a general, ‘Why won’t they shut it down?’ That’s when Weaver called Karl.”

Underlying much of the rivalry between the two camps were aides who openly feuded, most notably Karl Rove and John Weaver, two Texas strategists who had a falling out over money during a 1988 campaign that left them bitter enemies. Weaver finally decided it was time to end their dispute and asked Mark McKinnon, then working for Bush, to set up a meeting. With McKinnon chaperoning, Weaver and Rove sat down at a Caribou Coffee shop a block from the White House and agreed to put the past behind them.

McCain then joined the Bush re-election effort with zeal, stumping for the president across the country. But in private he could still be scornful. At the Republican National Convention in New York, McCain ran into the Democratic chairman, Terry McAuliffe, who was on hand to provide rebuttal. As they rode up an escalator, McAuliffe wrote in his memoir, McCain put his arm around the Democrat’s shoulder and whispered in his ear that Kerry needed to be more aggressive. “My guy is no great shakes,” McCain said of Bush, “but your guy looks like a wimp.”

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When he was with Bush, McCain kept trying to pump the president up, sometimes to extremes. In the green room before an Arizona debate with Kerry, according to aides for both men, McCain kept egging Bush on, telling him, “You’re going to be great” and “This is how you’ve got to hit him back.” Bush, looking for calm before the televised clash, found McCain’s hyper, boxing-coach performance off-putting. “Man, is he spun up,” Bush marveled to aides afterward.

Through the second term, McCain walked a delicate line. He and Bush had come to an uneasy détente. McCain admired Bush’s political operation, and as he began entertaining another run at the White House, he tried to co-opt it by recruiting Bush strategists and fund-raisers. He also reversed himself on key Bush policies like the tax cuts. At the same time, McCain grew increasingly disgruntled over the course of the war and the administration’s policies on detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists. His discussions about torture with Vice President Dick Cheney grew so testy that Bush pulled Cheney out and sent in the more diplomatic national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, instead.

In some ways, the more Bush got into trouble, the more McCain gravitated to him. The establishment figure from 2000 had become a lonely maverick in his own right, and McCain began to see Bush with more empathy. The Republican strategist Terry Nelson told me: “He would say: ‘They’re a smart group. Why aren’t they doing better?’ ”

That’s pretty much the question Bush now asks about McCain. As the senator began his second bid for the White House, Bush stayed out of the contest. But close advisers say he harbored a certain admiration for Mitt Romney, seeing more of himself in the former Massachusetts governor — another son of a politician from a patrician political family who took a businesslike approach to politics and was a reformer at the state level. Bush’s sister, Doro Bush Koch, openly backed Romney, and his brother Jeb, the former governor of Florida, sent the campaign several key advisers. George H. W. Bush hosted one of Romney’s most important speeches. The president never counted McCain out, though, and he was not entirely surprised when his onetime rival managed a come-from-behind victory to capture the nomination.

Democrats and their allies are now trying to brand a McCain presidency as “Bush’s third term,” but the McCain campaign has not exactly been running like a smooth extension of the Bush machine. The last time the party that held the White House nominated someone other than the incumbent president or vice president was 1952, and so for the first time in decades the incumbent party’s nominee does not have his own people sitting in on all the meetings at the White House every day.

Although McCain and Bush both want McCain to win the presidency, the two have different institutional priorities in the near term. While Bush seeks to close on a high note by setting out a “time horizon” to bring troops home from Iraq and finding a compromise with North Korea and maybe even Iran over their nuclear programs, in the process his efforts at times have left McCain hanging out alone in more hard-line stances.

Barry Jackson, the chief White House political strategist, convenes a conference call every evening with McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, to coordinate efforts. Yet each side has felt burned by the other. The first miscommunication came the very day Bush was slated to endorse McCain following his primary victories. A misunderstanding among advance staffs sent Bush out to the North Portico of the White House several long minutes before McCain’s car was actually due to arrive, leaving the hates-to-wait president just standing there in front of the assembled reporters. Bush kept his humor with the cameras on, even doing a little tap dance, but aides got an earful afterward.

Bush advisers later said McCain was not to blame for the mix-up, but they were not so forgiving of what happened the next month in New Orleans. Bush brought the president of Mexico and prime minister of Canada to New Orleans in April for a meeting. Hurricane Katrina is such a black mark on Bush’s record that he hoped to demonstrate how much he has done to rebuild what was lost. But just two days after Bush left town, McCain flew in to visit the Lower Ninth Ward, the hardest-hit section of New Orleans, and condemned the administration’s response to the hurricane as “disgraceful.” White House officials recognize that any candidate must promise to do better after Katrina, but they seethed at both the timing and the tone of McCain’s remarks. McCain aides tried to soothe the Bush team by telling them that the word “disgraceful” was not in the prepared text but came out spontaneously.

The grievances nursed by both sides have only grown from there. Not only was Bush kept under wraps at the Phoenix fund-raiser, it also came just hours after McCain gave a speech separating himself from the president’s nuclear-arms-control policies. For its part, the McCain team was aggravated that Bush’s address to Israeli lawmakers in May condemning appeasement of America’s enemies, a comment interpreted as a slap at Obama, stepped on their candidate’s speech the same day envisioning what a first McCain term would look like. The campaign was equally perturbed when McCain called for lifting restrictions on offshore drilling only to have Bush agree the next day, giving Democrats an opening to trash the senator as a Bush replica. Later that same week, Bush and McCain separately went to Iowa to inspect flood damage just 30 miles apart, each effectively distracting from the other’s effort to show compassion.

The crossed connections have left some political veterans scratching their heads. “I don’t think they’ve quite figured out how to do this,” John Weaver, the former McCain strategist, told me. “If they’re going to distance themselves from the president, they need to either do it or not do it.”

A Republican involved in keeping the two camps working in tandem said that coordination had improved, but, he added, Bush’s liabilities cannot be ignored. “It’s almost never a good thing to put them together,” he told me. Asked if there was a risk of looking too eager to keep Bush in the closet, the strategist said, “I don’t want to be unkind here, but when you’re at 29 percent, I think the answer is probably no.”

So McCain picks his Bush moments with care. If the current president is too radioactive, then he will seek out the former one. In late July, at the rocky oceanfront Walker’s Point homestead in Kennebunkport, George H. W. Bush drove McCain in a golf cart up to a gaggle of reporters to talk about the campaign. No mystery about why they would spend more than 14 seconds together. “He’s the popular one,” a McCain aide explained.

After the news conference overlooking the water on an overcast but lovely Maine day, McCain left for his next event while a few reporters stayed to chat with the 84-year-old former president. Someone noted to him that Obama had recently said nice things about his foreign policy. “Has he said anything nice about my son’s foreign policy?” the elder Bush asked, recognizing that any praise for him was meant as a dig at the current president. He did not seem surprised when told no.

But the father said the son could handle the heat. “He’s fine,” he said. “We talk all the time. It’s been a tough run in terms of criticism. But that’s all right. He’s strong.” The elder Bush shook his head. “A bad break on the economy,” he added ruefully. “But who knows?”

We got into a discussion about his handling of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and how history looks more favorably on the restraint he showed at the time, seeing it now, as he did then, as a prudent decision not to rub it in the face of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and risk provoking a reaction. I asked if he thought his own experience with this sort of historical revisionism offered a lesson for his son. He said he did. But he added, “I don’t pass it along.”

Why not?

“Well, why?” he asked. “I’m 84. He doesn’t need any advice from an old guy.”

He added: “I got confidence in him. Every.”

Will history look on Iraq in a better light 10 years from now?

“I hope so,” he said softly. And then after a slight pause, he made sure to add, “And think so.”

With time winding down, advisers say Bush has turned surprisingly wistful. The president has thrown aside the meticulous schedule to halt his motorcade during several recent out-of-town trips — to chat with children who had set up a lemonade stand outside a North Carolina fund-raiser or to pose for a birthday picture in Ohio with a 91-year-old woman whose family hoisted a sign asking him to stop. By one count, Bush has held 19 sports-related events already this year — from hosting bass fishermen at the White House to presiding over a T-ball game in Ghana — and that was before he attended the Olympics in Beijing.

In late June, the president traveled to a Washington hotel to address a conference of people involved in the faith-based social services he has provided federal money for, introduced by a homeless mother of two who was helped back onto her feet by one of the programs. For Bush, it was a moment to savor part of his legacy. But only three television cameras were on the riser in the back of the room to capture it, and two of them were owned by the government. Nothing about the conference appeared on the broadcast news that night or in the pages of the major papers the next day.

A month later, I went to another speech billed as major by the White House, this time celebrating Bush’s “freedom agenda” to an audience of diplomats, officials and others at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington. Bush traced the philosophical origins of his policy to Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Reagan. And he introduced a few dissidents from Cuba, Belarus, North Korea and Iran. “I know there are moments when it feels like you’re alone in your struggle,” he said, seemingly channeling Spensha Baker. “And you’re not alone. America hears you.”

But in fact, America that day was hearing Barack Obama, who hours later delivered his speech in Berlin, carried live on television. Bush’s speech the next day received an article in The Washington Times, but none in The Washington Post and only a one-and-a-half-paragraph mention in The New York Times account of the Obama address. Even the venerable Associated Press, dutiful chronicler of nearly everything any president ever says, filed no story. No surprise, then, that statistics compiled by the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University found that the man Jon Stewart calls “Still President Bush” gets less than 40 percent of the coverage on the three big broadcast newscasts that he did in his first seven years in office.

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R. Kikuo Johnson

The news media is not the only institution that has essentially moved on. The Democratic Congress, with even lower approval ratings than the president’s, has all but washed its hands of him. The Congressional leadership has decided not to send him spending bills for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1 and instead will pass temporary spending bills to keep the government running until the next president arrives. Representative Rahm Emanuel, the House Democratic Caucus chairman, complained to me that Bush and his aides want to fight, not cut deals. “They think being stubborn is tough,” he said. “Stubborn is not tough; it’s stubborn.”

The success of the surge has heartened Bush’s allies and advisers, offering a measure of redemption before he leaves office. In truth, they admit, it worked out better than they ever really hoped. The initial uproar in January 2007 over Bush’s announcement that he was sending more troops was so fierce, from both parties, that Peter Wehner, then the White House director of strategic initiatives, sent an e-mail message to Rove, Bartlett and the White House chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, warning that “the presidency is on the line.” In the end, Bush was right, Wehner told me recently, calling it “the most admirable, impressive decision the president made.”

“Bush will not have lost Iraq,” he went on to say. “We almost did. It was slipping out of our fingers. Or to use another metaphor, the place was heading for the cliff, and we pulled it out at the last minute. He’s going to hand over an Iraq that is much better than it was two years ago.” Still, Wehner said, the cost of the war to Bush’s presidency proved enormous. “It was mishandled for too long, and we deserve blame for this. If Iraq had gone well, Bush would be a political colossus, and the Republican Party would bear his imprint in every way. But it didn’t.”

While relieved at the changing fortunes in Iraq, many Bush advisers cannot help now wondering why it took so long to change strategy. Many blame it on Rumsfeld and the president’s reluctance to remove him. Without Iraq sucking the energy out of Bush’s second term, they reason, maybe he would have had a better chance of pushing through the big domestic achievements he sought, like overhauling Social Security, rewriting the tax code and liberalizing immigration laws. “For some of us who were there, the frustration is, Could this have happened earlier?” Gerson asked. Bartlett had the same question when I went to see him in Texas. “The hard part for everybody is to say how different would it have been if that decision had been made 12 or 16 months before,” he said.

In this final season for the Bush presidency, the battle for legacy is being waged on several fronts — including in the Oval Office itself. When Bush invited a group of conservative scholars and writers for an off-the-record, 90-minute talk at the end of June, he found himself under fire for supposedly abandoning principle in the pursuit of posterity.

The presidential pique flared when Max Boot, a military historian at the Council on Foreign Relations and an informal adviser to McCain, spoke up to question what he, like many of his fellow neoconservatives, see as a shifting and softening of policies, according to several people in the room.

A lot of people think you’ve changed from your first term to your second term, Boot began.

“That’s ridiculous,” Bush interrupted.

Undaunted, Boot continued with the bill of particulars: on Iran, on North Korea, on Egypt, on Middle East democracy. Some of his supporters thought Bush was not pushing as hard as he once did, that he was too willing to accept less than he once demanded.

Bush retorted sharply. “That’s not true,” he said, leaning forward in his wingback chair and glaring straight at Boot. Bush seemed most angry at the implication that he was not as committed to what he calls his freedom agenda, which he considers the centerpiece of his presidency. “I’ve been fighting for this from Day 1,” he said. “It’s part of everything I do.”

Boot remained unimpressed. He cited a column in that morning’s Wall Street Journal by John Bolton, who was Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, lacerating the administration for betraying its own principles by lifting some sanctions on North Korea in exchange for an incomplete accounting of Pyongyang’s nuclear program. “Nothing can erase the ineffable sadness of an American presidency, like this one, in total intellectual collapse,” Bolton wrote.

Bush grew more agitated at the mention of his own former senior diplomat. “Let me just say from the outset that I don’t consider Bolton credible,” the president said bitterly. Bush had brought Bolton into the top ranks of his administration, fought for Senate confirmation and, when lawmakers balked, defied critics to give the hawkish aide a recess appointment. “I spent political capital for him,” Bush said, and look what he got in return. The president went on to defend his North Korea decision, saying his “action for action” approach held out the most hope of getting rid of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons.

(When I reached Boot later, he declined to describe his discussion with Bush. Bolton, on the other hand, scoffed at Bush’s assertion that he has been consistent on North Korea. “It’s just divorced from reality,” Bolton told me. “Of course it’s a different policy than the first term. He says we haven’t changed a bit, and that’s just not accurate.”)

As he wraps up his presidency, Bush has grown increasingly combative in defending his record on all fronts, unwilling to let others define him through their own prisms. He often quarrels with the premise of an interviewer’s question that casts his tenure in a way he does not agree with. When he conducted a series of sit-down sessions with foreign journalists before his last Middle East trip, he kept disputing their perception of reality.

“No, that’s not an accurate statement,” he chided an Israeli reporter who said the president had waited seven years to become actively involved in the peace process.

“Well, I don’t think it’s an accurate description,” he complained a half-hour later when an Arab reporter suggested that Lebanon’s embattled prime minister had been abandoned.

And while disclaiming any interest in legacy, the president has begun laying out what he seems to hope his will be. Speaking to an Egyptian interviewer in May, the president said: “I think history will say George Bush clearly saw the threats that keep the Middle East in turmoil and was willing to do something about it, was willing to lead and had this great faith in the capacity of democracies and great faith in the capacity of people to decide the fate of their countries and that the democracy movement gained impetus and gained movement in the Middle East.” To a Thai journalist this month, he described his epitaph this way, “Somebody who took on tough challenges and didn’t shy away from doing what he thought was right.”

That, at least, will be the case he makes aided by the future George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University and a planned freedom institute. Bush’s advisers say he intends to use the institute as a catalyst for democracy movements around the world, inviting prominent dissidents and activists for conferences or fellowships. Although they say he does not plan to travel the world intervening in foreign disputes as Jimmy Carter does or sponsoring health initiatives as Bill Clinton does, he hopes his institute will encourage opposition leaders in places like Zimbabwe, Belarus, Cuba, Iran and other repressive states that he focused on during his administration.

Beyond the library, Bush plans to write a book and is settling on a ghostwriter. During a private gathering for House Republican leaders in the White House residence this summer, he mused about using the book to set the record straight as he sees it. “He has a number of pivotal points in his presidency that he’s willing to sit down and reflect on,” Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the House minority whip, told me afterward. “He believes that history is on his side. And if it’s not, he’s never going to know.”

Bush, the former Texas Rangers co-owner, does not plan to go back into sports but will earn money through paid speeches, friends say. While keeping the ranch in Crawford, Bush is also buying a house in Dallas to be near the library and the institute. He talked about it during a recent fund-raiser in Houston that was closed to reporters but was surreptitiously videotaped by a guest who slipped it to a local television station.

“We’ve got a housing issue,” Bush told the donors before adding mischievously, “evidently not in Dallas, because Laura’s over there trying to buy a house today.”

The crowd laughed. “What about Crawford?” someone shouted.

“I like Crawford,” Bush replied. “Unfortunately, after eight years of asking her to sacrifice, I am now no longer the decision maker. She’ll be deciding, thanks for the suggestion. I suggest you don’t yell it out when she’s here. I did tell her, I said: ‘Honey, we’ve been on government pay now for 14 years. Go slow!’ ”

For now, his role in the campaign is relegated mainly to closed-door fund-raisers for party committees and Congressional candidates. He has raised $138 million so far this two-year cycle, still shy of the $194 million he pulled in during the 2005-06 campaign, according to the Republican National Committee. Before heading to Houston last month, Bush stopped in Tucson to headline yet another fund-raiser for a little-known House candidate. Although he was in McCain’s home state, the presidential candidate was nowhere around. Bush did his thing at the $1,000-a-head event, giving a talk and posing for photographs, the 33rd time he had done so this year.

When the motorcade left the event, it made its way through Tucson, passing by people gathered to watch. A few held up signs.